Having seen the powerful documentary Deliver Us From Evil (required viewing for all Catholics) this past weekend at my local theater, my belief that the Catholic Church is nothing more than a front for NAMBLA has been reinforced tenfold.
The movie follows the carousings of Father Oliver O’Grady as he uses the Catholic cloak to diddle the private parts of young girls and boys, all under the strict supervision and full support of the Catholic Church. Whenever the heat from parents or law enforcement grew a bit too hot, O’Grady’s fellow NAMBLA members such as Cardinal Roger Mahoney (notable to those of us living in Southern California), forgave and blessed the Irish pederast, and sent him on his way to yet another community so that O’Grady could rack up more victims in the name of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Catholic Church, and all those who call themselves Catholics.

Yes. If you are a member of the Catholic Church, and you haven’t had your head buried in the sand for the last 20 years, then you well comprehend that you are members in a faith based around fucking little girls and boys–in fact, if you do nothing to prevent it–to at least bring it to light–you are complicit in it. All you are accomplishing is the offering up of your money to ensure the church retains enough power, political and financial, to push aside all complaints of child sexual abuse. If you do nothing but go to Mass, confess your sins, and say some fucking hail-Mary’s, then you can sleep well at night knowing that your financial and spiritual support allow tens of thousands of priests around the world to suck, fuck, and generally sodomize hundreds of thousands and probably millions of children.

But hey, if you have no issue (and by “no issue” I mean that you do absolutely nothing but be a “good, church-going Catholic”) with the idea of this man…

…sticking his dick into your child, then please continue what you’re doing. Give your money to pedophile protectors like Roger Mahoney. Give them more power. Allow Mahoney and his ilk to shuffle more child molesters to churches throughout the community to spread his seed (and by seed, I mean his sperm) of rot on other unsuspecting families and children.

Because that’s all Roger Mahoney did. Whenever the spotlight became too bright on child rapist O’Grady, Mahoney would simply ship the monster to another parish 50 miles away. This happened over and over and over, despite the fact that O’Grady’s superiors promised abused families, in exchange that they wouldn’t press charges, that the Irish priest would be moved to an all male monastary, presumably so that he and other Catholic sodomites could diddle and dork each other all day without harming small children. Nope, Mahoney just moved him into another town, another neighborhood, and more child prey.

Why does this happen? Why does the Catholic Church allow… Scratch that. Why does the Catholic Church encourage priests to fuck little kids? Because the individual hierarchy–bishops, cardinals, etc.–want as much power as possible at the expense of people’s lives and souls.

If Mahoney, and all those who protect pedophiles in the church, believes in a Christian god, then he and they must understand that eternal hellfire awaits them for what they have done and what they continue to do, and all for fleeting power here and now in this world.

What is more telling is the fact that the Church does so much to cover up the tens of thousands of sexual abuse allegations. They attempt to cover them up to their clueless parishioners. They attempt to cover them up to the authorities. That is an appalling and detestable stance for a faith-based organization to take, and it’s something I have never truly been able to grasp. Yet it all comes back to power, and Mahoney wants it the most. He wants to become the first American Pope, and he’ll do whatever is necessary to make certain that happens, including that he ensures the sodomizing of thousands of children to come.

On a more basic level, why does this happen? I’m not repeating the same question I asked earlier. This is a new question leveled squarely at priests who enjoy screwing boys and girls. Why do they do it? Why does there seem to exist a disproportionately large pedophile community within the Catholic Church?

The main reason, I believe, is the fact that priests within the church are not allowed to enter into wedded bliss. They are apparently required to live a chaste and intemerate life, meaning no drugs, no marriage, no carnal relations, and certainly no baby fucking. And yet, the Church continues to court, encourage, and protect men who like to fondle the undeveloped genitalia of little girls and boys. If those in the order were only allowed to marry, I would be shocked if priest pedophilia weren’t slashed by 90 percent at least. It’s amazing what a nice bout of regular copulation with a woman (or man if you’re a gay priest) of age will do for a man. Hell, it’s almost like neutering them. They’ll no longer find the need to recklessly lash out sexually with whomever is the most easily accessible and vulnerable prey. It would be an extraordinary revolution within the Catholic Church.

But it won’t happen, and this is why. The Catholic Church cares more for money and power than the spiritual sanity of their followers. I’m sure there are many “good” Catholics out there who scoff at this notion, and who bristle at the idea of altering traditions and doctrine within the Church. Some claim that priests don’t marry in order to ape the life and teachings of Jesus and his priesthood. To those I say, you’re mindless idiots.

Catholic priests were once allowed to wed. In fact, several popes were married. Additionally, some of Jesus’ disciples had wives, so whoever tells you otherwise is either lying or simply stupid. As I said, the truth lies in greed and the desire for more power. Centuries ago, the upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy became annoyed with the passing of money and land from priests to their heirs. As a result, the Church altered doctrine to prohibit any man entering into the priesthood the right to marry, thereby siphoning all money the priests had to the church after their death.

The end result? The nurturing of legions of pederasts into the folds of the Catholic Church.

Father Oliver O’Grady’s first victim was a little girl. He raped her. He ruined her life. His next victim was a little boy. He raped him and he ruined his life as well. When you’re the follower of a faith whose leaders believe that fucking a little girl isn’t as bad as fucking a little boy, you must take a step back and examine why you are a member of that organization. To me it seems you have only two choices: Leave the Church forever, or fight it that it should change its pedophile advocating ways.

With nearly a thousand open individual criminal investigations delving into Catholic priest sexual abuse in Los Angeles County alone, imagine how many more there are around the country–around the world. If that doesn’t affect you, I’ll leave you with this quote from the film, Deliver Us From Evil offered as a wake up call to those who simply can’t wrap their minds around horrors such as these. Excuse me for paraphrasing, but this is fairly accurate.

“It is difficult for poeple to fathom what actually transpires during these molestations, to imagine that a grown man would actually insert his penis into the vagina of an infant.”

Wednesday, October 25, 2006He was the closest thing to God they knew. Bob Jyono can still picture the priest he and his wife, Maria, called Ollie, a family friend who often spent the night in their Lodi home, saying his morning prayers with a Bible in his hands.

“And all during the night, he’s molesting my daughter — not molesting, raping her! — at 5 years old,” wails Jyono in “Deliver Us From Evil.” It’s a devastating documentary about Oliver O’Grady, the notorious pedophile priest who sexually abused children, including a 9-month-old baby, in a string of Central California towns for 20 years — and the Catholic bishops who moved him from parish to unsuspecting parish, allegedly covering up his crimes.

“For God’s sake! How did this happen?” Jyono cries.

That’s one of the questions posed by this wrenching film, which opens at Bay Area theaters Friday. “Deliver Us From Evil” has rekindled long-standing accusations that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, a powerful church leader who was bishop of the Stockton Diocese from 1980-85, knew O’Grady was a pedophile but failed to keep him away from children.

Directed by former TV news producer Amy Berg, the film is built around chilling interviews with the defrocked priest, who was deported to his native Ireland in 2000 after serving seven years of a 14-year prison sentence prison for committing four “lewd and lascivious” act with two young brothers. He speaks in a lilting Celtic voice that sounds like Mrs. Doubtfire, making him even creepier. He dispassionately recounts his heinous acts as if describing someone else. He wears a sly smile as he says what arouses him: “How about children in swimsuits? I’d say, yeah. How about children in underwear? I’d say, yeah. How about children naked? Uh-huh, yeah.”

Berg spent eight days interviewing O’Grady in Dublin, where he moved freely about the city, walking through parks where children played, pondering his obsession as he sits in an empty church.

“Basically what I want to say is, it should not have happened,” says the fallen priest in the film. He told Mahony of his “situation,” he says, and “I should’ve been removed and attended to. And he should have then attended to the people I’d harmed. I wish he’d done that.”

He writes letters of apology to his victims and invites them to Ireland for a conciliatory reunion (“God speed, and hope to see you real soon,” he says with a wink).

In the film, another victim, Adam M., reads the letter in disbelief. “I could kill his mother,” says the man, pointing to the San Andreas rectory where O’Grady sodomized him. It was Adam M.’s mother who brought the priest into the family home. As she says in the film, “He was the wolf and I was the gatekeeper, and I let the wolf through the gate.”

O’Grady later retracted the invitations and, according to Berg, has fled Ireland in the wake of publicity about the movie. His whereabouts are unknown, a frightening development to those he abused decades ago, who are still haunted by him.

“There’s not a day that I don’t suffer from what he did to me,” said Ann Jyono, a 40-year-old insurance agent, on the phone from her Southern California home.

Jyono says O’Grady began molesting her when she was 5 and kept at it until she was 12. Jyono didn’t tell her folks for years, until O’Grady was arrested in 1993. She testified at his criminal trial and in a 1998 civil case that cost the Stockton diocese $7 million — a small fraction of what the Catholic Church has paid out in scores of sexual abuse cases that have scandalized the institution. Jyono’s suit was thrown out because of the statute of limitations.

Seeing and hearing O’Grady again, even on film, “was traumatic. I felt like I was 5 again,” said Jyono, who appears in “Deliver Us From Evil.” “I was still so afraid of that man. At the same time, I was pleased that his psychotic, narcissistic personality allowed him to tell the truth and show how psychotic he is. I was proud of him: He finally did it, he finally said the words. … His craziness and his evil were captured onscreen.”

The film also points to the culpability of church officials, like Mahony, who has been named in numerous civil suits by victims of priestly abuse. “They banked on our silence and our shame,” Jyono said. “That’s how they got away with it for so long.”

She and the others were reluctant to tell their stories on camera. But after meeting with Berg, they came to trust her and agreed to participate, painful as it was.

The director had produced stories about the clergy sexual-abuse scandal for CBS and CNN, including a piece about O’Grady that she said left a lot of questions in her mind. She got hold of his phone number and called. To her amazement, he agreed to meet with her. She flew to Ireland, had a series of conversations with him and then flew home to Los Angeles. About five months later, O’Grady agreed to speak on camera.

“He wanted to tell his story,” Berg, 36, said the other day in a San Francisco hotel suite. “A lot of times I listened in disbelief. But I took it in and allowed it to come onto the video. It’s an important story, and I had to stay distanced from it. You could become emotional sitting in front of a pedophile for eight days. It’s not a pleasant thing. So I had to stay professional and let him talk. I was kind of shocked by his candor, and then by his inability to understand what he did, the impact of it.”

O’Grady spoke about his transgressions “like he got a flat tire on the way to work, and he turned in the wrong direction,” Berg continued, “like it was just an occurrence, something that happened; it’s not something he did.” She wants him to watch the movie so he can see what he wrought, but she doesn’t know where to send it.

Because of police reports, depositions and other documents, Berg has no doubt that the bishops overseeing O’Grady knew about his actions and chose to cover them up in order to avoid scandal and a stain on their careers.

In 1984, a Stockton police investigation into sexual abuse allegations against O’Grady was reportedly closed after diocese officials promised to remove the priest from any contact with children. Instead, he was reassigned to a parish about 50 miles east, in San Andreas, where he continued to molest kids. Not long after, Mahony was promoted to archbishop of Los Angeles, the largest Catholic diocese in the country. In the film, O’Grady says Mahony was “very supportive and very compassionate” and that “another situation had been smoothly handled.”

William Hodgman, the Los Angeles deputy district attorney in charge of prosecuting pedophile priests, told the New York Times that the movie “will fuel ongoing considerations as to whether Cardinal Mahony and others engaged in criminal activity.”

Mahony, whose taped depositions in civil cases in 1997 and 2004 appear in the documentary, has denied knowing O’Grady was a serial child molester. Church officials declined to be interviewed for the film, and they say any suggestion that the cardinal is the subject of a criminal investigation is irresponsible. The cardinal’s spokesman, Tod Tamberg, has seen “Deliver Us From Evil” and called it “an obvious anti-church hit piece.”

In a phone interview with The Chronicle, Tamberg said, “Everyone should be saddened by the kind of emotional and spiritual devastation that these kind of child molesters can wreak on individuals and families. That said, this movie is incredibly biased and omits many facts that would’ve changed the assumption the movie makes.”

The movie, Tamberg added, “is chock full of attorneys and expert witnesses who make millions of dollars every year in abuse litigation against the church. It’s a big advertisement for them.”

That’s not how Nancy Sloan sees it. She says O’Grady first abused her in 1976 at age 11, and she’s never fully recovered.

“The 11-year-old in me is still afraid of him,” said Sloan, 41, a Fairfield nurse who appears in the film, during a phone interview. O’Grady is the “sick individual” who sexually abused her, Sloan said — in his Dodge Duster on Highway 12 two minutes from her home, as well as in a Lodi swimming pool, in the church and rectory. He even fondled her in the state Capitol, which she entered for the first time in 26 years to speak on behalf of a 2003 bill temporarily extending the statute of limitations on sex crimes by clerics.

But “as sad as it may seem, I have felt compassion for him. I have to remember that at some point, he was a little boy who was molested by a priest, and molested by his (older) brother.” She wonders how that broke him, why he didn’t become a survivor who tried to help others rather than someone who “went down the wrong path and turned into a deviant.”

Her anger is mostly directed at the monsignors and bishops who didn’t stop him, who told her parents she must’ve misinterpreted the priest’s actions.

“If a miracle could happen, I would love for them to be given 24 hours as a survivor,” Sloan said. “To have the nightmare that I had two nights ago, waking up over and over and thinking O’Grady was back, and did I lock the door. ‘Why didn’t I lock the door? O’Grady is coming in.’ I’d like for them to have compassion for survivors and not just give lip service.”

Sloan still feels sick whenever she sees a Dodge Duster. “You don’t see too many of them anymore; thank God for small favors,” she said with a laugh. She’s no longer a Catholic and doesn’t even know what that means. “Do I believe in God? Yes. Do I believe in Jesus? Yes. Do I believe in the Eucharist? Yes. Do I believe in the hierarchy of the church? No. Do I believe in the pope and that he’s infallible? Hell no.”

Ann Jyono still goes to church sometimes and cries. The hatred she feels for O’Grady is still a heavy burden, she said. “I could forgive the man if he would commit himself for life to an institution for adults only. I need to know that I don’t have to wake up every night with a fright, wondering where he is or if he’s hurting other kids.”

She’d like to see Cardinal Mahony removed from his post and get the same treatment as citizens who don’t wear the collar. “If my neighbor’s son raped a little girl and ran home and told his mother, and she gave him a plane ticket and money and sent him off, she would be arrested for aiding and abetting her son. I just don’t understand why the justice system has failed us.”

Then there’s her father, a Japanese American Buddhist who converted to Catholicism to marry her Irish-born mother. He no longer believes in God. “The devil snuck into the church and stole my dad’s soul, and I want it back,” Jyono said the other day, crying.

Speaking out in this film has provided some solace.

“I finally found my voice and can talk about it. My father feels like I’m not a victim anymore, that I’m a survivor, on the road to healing. It may take a long, long time, but I think maybe I see light at the end of the tunnel, where I saw only darkness before.”

“Deliver Us From Evil,” which examines the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, and “Iraq in Fragments,” in which Iraqis recount life during wartime, are among the films nominated for the 22nd annual Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards.

The other three nominated feature documentaries, announced Wednesday by the International Documentary Assn., were: the political-campaign saga “Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?,” the Broadway expose “Showbusiness: A Season to Remember” and the displaced-musician story “Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars.”

The short documentaries nominated were: “The Blood of Yingzhou District,” “The Diary of Immaculee,” “Angel’s Fire” (Fuego de Angel), “The Short History of Sweet Potato Pie & How it Became a Flying Saucer,” and “The Wild Sheep, and the Fox and Love.”

The winners will be announced during a ceremony at the Directors Guild of America Theater in Los Angeles on December 8.